Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Seville and a Castle

International Partners and friends. But we did have a day off. Most of the STINTers went to Granada or Gibraltar. But my roomie that week, Bert, and I decided to make good use of our rental car and see more of Spain.

When I was in Spain, my 'dance card' was pretty full meeting with STINTers, STINT Team Leaders andWe drove several hours to Seville. Though it was a little disappointing. The whole way there from Malaga was nothing but olivegroves. Which were cool for about 5 minutes. Then when we got to Seville we realized that we didn't have a city map. We just figured we would find the city centre and there would be a plaza, museums and these fountains I heard Seville was famous for. We followed the signs to the city centre but suddenly found ourselves in a maze of narrow cobbled-stoned streets. We did see one little fountain and found a parking deck. But as we walked around we couldn't find one place open (it was around 1:30 pm) - even a cafe. The only places to eat seemed to be bars.

We saw one sign that we thought pointed to a palace so we turned down this narrow street, tried to avaiod the dog poop everywhere and finally found a pizza place. We ended up near the river a couple of hours later and decided we would be adventurous and try to find our way back another way. We ended up on the orginal street we were on and discovered when we turned off that we actually were only 3 or so blocks from Starbucks and some museums. DOH!

On the way back we decided to go the long route through the mountains and then along the coast. The coolest thing was that we saw a sign for this castle and pulled over a climbed around for a while.